JOHN GALSWORTHY
So interesting and significant a statement, buried as seed, might easily sprout as novel or play. I have no atom of evidence that Mr. Galsworthy ever saw the comment; but if he read it and forgot (buried?) the words, then Loyalties was written in their effectual disproof. For in this drama, as in all his novels, as in all his other dramas, Mr. Galsworthy is constantly seeing and portraying how conflicting loyalties both are right; he is never interested in the larger loyalty and cannot keep his eye on it through consecutive chapters or through a single act; he is forever presenting the two or more sides and taking none. He once said: “I suppose the hardest lesson we all have to learn in life is that we can’t have things both ways.” He should have added:“—and I have never learned it!”
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“Learned,” of course, in the sense of “accepted,” of becoming reconciled to the fact. It did not need Mr. St. John Ervine to tell us that “Mr. Galsworthy is the most sensitive figure in the ranks of modern letters”; for of all modern writers the author of Loyalties and The Forsyte Saga is the most transparent. He is transparent without being in the smallest degree luminous; he refracts, but he does not magnify—a prism through which we may look at society.
Compare him for a moment with Mr. Conrad. Mr. Conrad is by no means always transparent; his opacity is sometimes extraordinary, as in The Rescue; and yet from the midst of obscure sentences, like a gleam from those remarkably deep-set eyes, something luminous will shine out, both light and heat are given forth. “In a certain cool paper,” explains Galsworthy, “I have tried to come at the effect of the war; but purposely pitched it in a low and sober key; and there is a much more poignant tale of change to tell of each individual human being.” But even when telling the more poignant tale, as in Saint’s Progress, the coolness is noticeable, like the air of an April night; the key is still sober, pitched low; and the trembling passion of a melody proclaimed by violins is quickly muted. Such is his habitual restraint, so strong is his inhibition, that when we hear the orchestral brasses, as we do once or twice in Justice and Loyalties, it shocks us, like a rowdy outburst in a refined assembly or a terse sentence in Henry James. But it is nothing, nothing. Mr. Galsworthy has momentarily achieved a more perfect than usual transparency; he has suddenly surrendered to the pounce of another of those multitudinous loyalties which give him no peace and the secret of which, except for its continual disclosure in his works, he would most certainly carry with him to the grave.
For he does not talk. No! “You are nearer Galsworthy in reading his books than in a meeting.” Another keenly observant person summed up Galsworthy’s conversational resources in the one word: “Exhausted!” St. John Ervine: “Whatever of joy and grief he has had in life has been closely retained, and the reticence characteristic of the English people ... is most clearly to be observed in Mr. Galsworthy.... How often have we observed in our relationships that some garrulous person, constantly engaged in egotistical conversation, contrives to conceal knowledge of himself from us, while some silent friend, with lips tightly closed, most amazingly gives himself away. One looks at Mr. Galsworthy’s handsome, sensitive face, and is immediately aware of tightened lips!... But the lips are not tightened because of things done to him, but because of things done to others.” Mr. Galsworthy, in a personal letter: “The fact is I cannot answer your questions. I must leave my philosophy to my work generally, or rather, to what people can make out of that work. The habit of trying to tabloid one’s convictions, or lack of convictions, is a pretty fatal one; as I have found to my distaste and discredit.” He conducts his own cross-examination, in new books, new plays. He acknowledges, with quiet discontent, the claims upon his sense of loyalty of a dog, a jailbird, two “star-crossed lovers,” the wife of a possessive Forsyte, a De Levis unjustly used. His pen moves, with a bold stroke, across the paper; another secret is let out; his lips tighten. He is serene and indignant and completely happy.
Why not? “My experience tells me this: An artist who is by accident of independent means can, if he has talent, give the Public what he, the artist, wants, and sooner or later the public will take whatever he gives it, at his own valuation.” And he speaks of such artists as able to “sit on the Public’s head and pull the Public’s beard, to use the old Sikh saying.” Nothing else is worth while—for an artist. “The artist has got to make a stand against being exploited.” But if the artist should exploit himself, or anything more human or individual than that impersonal entity, the Public, Mr. Galsworthy’s mouth would become grim again; his loyalty would be forfeited, I think. There might be a larger cause, but his concern would be with the other fellow. And however hard you might press him for a verdict, he would bring in only a recommendation for mercy.
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The Galsworthys have been in Devonshire as far back as records go—“since the flood—of Saxons, at all events,” as John Galsworthy once put it. His mother came of a family named Bartleet, whose county for many centuries was Worcestershire. The boy, John, was born in 1867 at Coombe, in Surrey. “From the first,” continues the anonymous but authorised sketch I am quoting, “his salient characteristics were earnestness and tenacity. Not surprisingly brilliant, he was sure and steady; his understanding, not notably quick, was notably sound. At Harrow from 1881-1886 he did well in work and games. At New College, Oxford, 1886-1889, he graduated with an Honour degree in Law. After some further preparation he was called to the bar (Lincoln’s Inn) in 1890. It was natural he should have taken up the law, since his father had done so. ‘I read,’ he says, ‘in various chambers, practised almost not at all, and disliked my profession thoroughly.’
“In these circumstances he began to travel. His father, a successful and unusual man in both character and intellect, was ‘not in a position to require his son to make money’; his son, therefore, travelled, off and on, for nearly two years, going, amongst other places, to Russia, Canada, British Columbia, Australia, New Zealand, the Fiji Islands, and South Africa. On a sailing-ship voyage between Adelaide and the Cape he met and became a fast friend with the novelist Joseph Conrad, then still a sailor. We do not know whether this friendship influenced Galsworthy in becoming a writer; indeed, we believe that he has somewhere said that it did not. But Galsworthy did take to writing, published his first novel, Jocelyn, in 1899, Villa Rubein in 1900, A Man of Devon and Other Stories in 1901.” Jocelyn has been dropped from the list of Galsworthy’s works, Villa Rubein was revised in 1909, The Island Pharisees, a satire of English weaknesses which appeared in 1904, was revised four years later; and it was not until the publication of The Man of Property in 1906 that our author succeeded in sitting on the Public’s head and twining his fingers firmly into the Public’s whiskers.